The Art of Attracting and Nurturing Top Talent: Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition is a proactive strategy to anticipate the talent needs of an organization, source the best talent, and then fulfill the need by recruiting, evaluating, and taking candidates on board.

Good companies have effective talent acquisition strategies in place to make sure that they are able to onboard the most competent people who can eventually take leadership positions. Talent acquisition lies under the hood of talent management and is a forward-thinking technique with the goal to plan and automate hiring cycles. Talent acquisition is not only about filling the open positions but it aims to hire candidates by keeping proper career possibilities for them under consideration.

How’s it different from recruitment?

Well, it just seems to be another word for recruitment, right? But it isn’t.

Although the end goal of recruitment and talent acquisition is hiring people and both sound similar but recruitment is reactive and deals with the present need for hiring while talent acquisition encourages future planning and putting processes in place that make it possible to quickly hire and onboard the best fits.  

Focus points of talent acquisition strategy

Acknowledging the need for well-crafted recruiting plans, a lot of companies spend their time and budget on talent acquisition activities but still might not be able to achieve the desired results. They build careers websites, run referral programs and job ads, and improve their employer brand and yet, they are not able to get quality talent on board. This is because their strategies fail to focus on some key areas.  

Having a good talent acquisition strategy means that you should be able to answer the following questions.  

1 - Which parts of all talent acquisition activities are critical to the competitive advantage of the company and its long-term success? ‍

2 - What are some major challenges in talent acquisition and how does the company allocate resources to them?

3 - Related to given challenges and goals, what are key approaches in talent acquisition?

4 - How are those key approaches strategically aligned given the cultural and structural context?

Tips for an effective talent acquisition strategy

Each hiring a company does is important and impacts its culture and the numbers it produces. A recruitment joke goes like this, recruiters spend 10% of their time hiring a person and 90% of their time making up for it. Not building effective talent acquisition strategies that make it possible for the company to constantly get good people on board will eventually result in bad or mediocre hires.

Here are some tips and best practices companies follow in their talent acquisition activities!

Recruitment Marketing

Before you can expect some quality applicants to apply to your company, it’s important that they know you exist or have positions opened. Aggressive marketing of your job openings in concerned circles will eventually generate more leads resulting in a more competitive pool of potential candidates.

Below are some tips and tools you can use to market your openings more effectively.  

Job Ads

Companies use social media recruitment platforms, mainly LinkedIn, to publicize their open positions in concerned circles. Dedicated groups and pages on these social media platforms serve as a more effective way of announcing the positions.

Job Boards

Job boards let employers advertise job openings more effectively and to a more dedicated audience.  

Effective Job Description

Writing crisp and to-the-point job descriptions help gauge candidate interest. It lets them know if they are fit for the job. A good job description includes important company details, culture, and any benefits it provides to the employees. It may also mention the salary range. More thought-out job descriptions increase the odds of a better pool of candidates.

Career/Job Fairs

Job/career fairs in academic institutions are an excellent way to publicize your company and open positions. At such events, employers are much more aware of the audience they are interacting with. Students, who are not looking for jobs at the moment, will also be getting to know about the company which serves as marketing for the future.

Read how you can build a strong recruitment strategy.

Forecasting

Being able to anticipate any talent needs beforehand is one of the major goals of setting up talent acquisition strategies. A streamlined onboarding is simply not possible if a team can’t forecast its needs. Hiring managers should be able to feel the arising need for resources within time and keep a recruitment-ready pool of candidates at their disposal.

Employer Branding

Maintaining an alluring presence and captivating the attention of active and passive job seekers is key to landing quality employees. Passive job seekers might not be looking for jobs at the moment but it’s important to constantly let them know about your company. Below are some techniques companies use to maintain a healthy employer brand.

Read how a strong employer brand can up your hiring game.

Sharing the Fun Side, the Culture

What does the company do? What the culture is like? How do employees engage with each other? These are some basic things applicants like to know. Companies that pay attention to these aspects have their dedicated pages with the goal of sharing a fun side of the company. You can do things like ‘Day in a life of XYZ employee’, or ‘Life at XYZ’.  

Perks and Benefits

To maintain a good employer brand, offering perks and benefits to your employees can be very helpful. Performance-based bonuses, loyalty bonuses, and recurrent increments are things that will improve the company’s reputation.

Social Media Engagement

A good social media presence means that you constantly engage candidates and share what you are doing. Sharing stuff like release notes, changelogs, and whatever new or interesting happens to your company can be a good way to keep the presence.  

Building a Pipeline

For an effective talent acquisition strategy, the importance of building a streamlined pipeline can’t be stressed enough. A pipeline that keeps the talent in the loop, from sourcing to finally onboarding and training, is decisive.                  

A good pipeline will let you fill the positions really quickly without compromising the quality of hires. For this, talent pools can be created for each position which means you always have some options if need be. Tools like Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can be helpful in building pipelines and keeping a track of the talent that you source. Read more about what an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) does.

A job pipeline can be handy even after the onboarding of an employee. You can use pipelines for training programs and nurturing your employees for specific roles. 

Keeping it slow

Hiring the right people is going to be decisive for where your company stands in the coming years. Rushing things while recruiting might hurt in the longer run. Talent acquisition strategy should be designed in a way that makes sure the recruitment team doesn’t have to take uninformed decisions or rush the process. If things are preplanned, sorted and well thought-out, a lot of mess can be avoided even when there is a massive load on the recruitment team.  

Postface

The whole process of building talent acquisition strategies can be demanding but once put in place, it makes it much smoother to constantly get quality people onboard. The need for hiring is always going to be there and if a load-withstanding acquisition process is not built, hiring will always create a mess. It will waste lots of time and money. Situations may arise when there are massive employee departures, or when there arises a need for massive hiring for a project, and only a well-prepared acquisition process can take you out of those.  

If you do not have one in place at the moment, get started immediately. Need an ATS to keep track of your talent? Read about our product HireCinch here.